The Rising of the Tide: The Story of Sabinsport

by Ida M. Tarbell

At the head of his notes he had put a title, “The Great Revenge.” As he talked his imagination kindled, and almost before he knew it he fell into a rhapsody:

“In thinking of that great day—the day when victory is near and certain,” he said, “I have dreamed a dream, and in this dream I have seen the Allied statesmen and their military leaders gathered for a final conference which they believed will be the last before the end of this greatest of human tragedies.

“With the terms for the world settlement outlined and accepted, with a full knowledge of the military situation before them, with a sober certainty that victory is in their hands, though it may be delayed, the conference is ready to disband. And it is then that an American general, whom first the Allied military forces and later the Allied diplomats had come to listen to with respect, if not eagerness, not only for the knowledge and fine judgment that he brought to their councils but because of a quality of spiritual insight which many of them believed to amount to genius—it was then that this American general asked a hearing.

“‘As you know,’ he said, ‘I am in the fullest agreement with every conclusion of this conference. I believe that the military situation of the Allied armies has been rightly presented, that nothing has been concealed of either weakness or strength, that the conclusion that the enemy must soon yield is inevitable from the facts that have been laid before us. What I ask the privilege of saying to this conference will add nothing to what you already know, it will add nothing to the plan of world reorganization which has been suggested. It is not a matter on which action is required. It may be called a dream or a vision, as you please. I only beg that you will listen, and not deride, for what I have to say comes from an inner conviction so deep that to withhold it would be for me little better than treason to the great end of all this suffering, this labor of spirit and of mind through which we have gone in these many hard years.

“‘The enemy will soon yield. I am one of those that believe that he will yield at or before his last line of defense. I believe this, not because I think that line less strong than it has been represented, less strong than the enemy himself has boasted it to be—it may be the most nearly impregnable line of defense that has been constructed in all the history of the world—I believe he will yield because I believe that yielding at this point is the inevitable result of his own lifelong military teachings.

“‘Germany has held that those people she wished to subdue could be frightened into submission. Her people have been schooled for years to believe that by inventing new and unheard of ways of destruction, by attacking the defenseless, by stealthily striking where the laws of war had forbidden men to strike, they could so terrorize the world that it would submit to her supremacy without long resistance. She has learned that neither the French nor the English, the Italian nor the American people can be terrorized. She has learned that free people have no fear of human devices, however hideous and destructive.

“‘But what is the logical result of this story of teaching on the minds of the people who teach it? This doctrine of frightfulness will—already has—acted as a boomerang. There is not a military man in this room who has not, from the beginning of his experience with the enemy, found that when their own methods were turned back they were the quickest to say “Enough.” When we turned their own infernal gas inventions against them they appealed to the laws of war. When, after months and months of endurance of their bombardment of peaceful towns and countrysides, England, in despair and rage, retaliated, they again appealed to the laws of war. The natural reaction of their own gospel is to make them and their peoples fear the things which they taught other nations would fear.

“‘Germany has given to the world the most awful exhibits of destructiveness that mortal man has ever conceived. We, who have marched through the torn and battered villages and homes of France and Belgium and Serbia, have been made old and gray by the things that we have seen. She believed that this destruction would take the heart out of us. She did not know the peoples she attacked. And now her turn has come. My conviction is that those who have taught this frightfulness, and the people to whom they have taught it, will never have the moral or physical courage to run the risk of having applied to them what they have applied to us. The day we reach this last invincible line and make our first break in it—as we know we shall—that day the sword of the enemy will be laid down! They will not be able to face the horrors of fighting on their own land, of seeing their own villages, their own homes, undergoing the awful punishment which they have so wantonly given the villages and homes of other countries. They will yield. They will yield on the border. Gentlemen, we shall not be obliged to fight our way to Berlin. And I am one of those who will be glad when the time comes that we are not to take another life, not to devastate another mile of the earth’s fair face; that we are not to batter down another cottage, or destroy another beautiful work of man’s hands.

“‘But that does not mean that I believe that the Allied armies should not go to Berlin. What I have at this moment to propose to this conference is that when the day comes—as it surely will—that the German and the Austrian emperors and their high commands say to us, “We yield,”—the Allied armies shall say to them: “Gentlemen, you will yield in Berlin. We go to Berlin. But we go to your capital not as destroyers; we go as saviors of freedom.

“‘“We shall make no claim upon you in crossing your land. We shall lead our armies—French, English, Italian, American—through your fertile fields, your pleasant villages, into your beautiful capital, without cost or pain or destruction to you. We shall take with us our food, we shall ask no lodging for which we do not give fair return, and we shall pledge our honor that no woman suffer, even by word or look, from those hundreds of thousands of marching men.”